Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  Beyond the paddies Hambleton spotted a village, perhaps a mile and a half away, the huts strung out in a narrow line instead of clumped together. He couldn’t see beyond the village but imagined there were more rice paddies on the other side. Looking south, he saw another, smaller hamlet, with fewer huts. But what caught Hambleton’s attention was a small garden next to the rice paddy a short distance away.

  With the eye of a born midwesterner, he studied the garden closely. There was a big plot of corn, as well as what looked like watermelon, taro—a starchy tuber—pineapple, and red pepper. He looked for the bright reds and yellows of ripe fruit and vegetables, but everything in the garden appeared to be green. Clearly it was the wrong time of year to go foraging in South Vietnam.

  Hambleton squinted at the tall stalks of corn, studying the tassels that moved lazily in the light breeze. It looked to him as if the strands of silk that fluttered below the tops of the plants were just starting to turn brown, which meant they were beginning to ripen. He thought of the taste of young corn. He memorized the position of three ears that seemed the ripest and decided to return tonight and take just those.

  Closer to him, he saw spotted something red. Berries, they looked like, hanging in the branches of several bushes in one of the paddies. His mouth was painfully dry and his stomach was rumbling; he decided to risk it. Hambleton stood up, took a deep breath, and dashed out into the paddy. When he reached the first bush, he plucked a piece of the fruit—it looked like a raspberry—and popped it in his mouth. Sweet. The Negritos who ran the survival school in the Philippines had taught him that sweet meant safe to eat. Usually. Hambleton wanted to grab handfuls of the fruit, but he was worried that someone would look up and spot him. Reluctantly he turned and ran back to the trees and from there made his way toward his hiding place.

  After a few minutes of walking, he stopped, looking around in confusion. Where was his hiding place? The trees all looked the same to him, and he hadn’t dared mark his shelter, in case a villager stumbled across it. By running off without leaving a trace of where his stuff was, he’d managed to outsmart himself. The navigator felt panic rise up. Without the flares, the rescue would be much harder to pull off, and he needed the .38 to fight off any pursuers.

  Hambleton took several slow breaths, telling himself to calm down. He marked the spot where he was standing, then began to walk in concentric circles. It took him three minutes, but after a few circuits his boot slipped into the hole. He let out a breath and crawled in.

  When dusk fell, he emerged from his hole and walked to the edge of the undergrowth, pausing several minutes to make sure no villagers were walking nearby. Then he stepped nervously out of the dark grove onto the trail and headed straight for the garden. He plucked three ears of corn, along with some berries and a pineapple, and headed back to his hiding place.

  When he’d made it, Hambleton lay down in the dugout hole and brought out his take. He popped berry after berry into his mouth. They were unlikely to keep off the vine for long, so he decided to eat all of them. Delicious. The juice relieved the raspy dryness of his throat; he thought he’d never tasted anything so refreshing. Then he moved on to an ear of corn. He slowly stripped away the husk and the wisps of silk covering the ripe kernels, then dug a small hole in the ground with his knife and placed the discards in it. Once he covered that up with dirt, he held the ear in both hands and took his first bite of the yellow kernels. God, they were tasty—ripe and filled with a sweet milk. He savored the ear, biting into one kernel at a time until he’d finished the whole thing. Then he took the cob and bit off a chunk, grinding the stuff between his molars before swallowing. The pineapple came out next. It was hard as a piece of granite. Hambleton spent a few minutes turning it this way and that, trying to penetrate its husk with his teeth, but gave up and tucked it away for the future.

  For the moment, he was satisfied.

  While this was going on, Bill Henderson, hiding about a mile from his fellow American, took time to examine his injuries. The explosion of the SAM had messed him up a bit. His eyebrows and mustache had been burned off by the fireball; he had a deep cut across his cheek—which he immediately began to hope might produce a facsimile of one of those German dueling scars—and that gaping hole in his chest through which you could see the white of his sternum. But, all in all, he was in good spirits. He thought of the voice that had sounded in his ears and told him to eject. He was shaken by it, and comforted. He believed he’d heard, in his moment of extremity, nothing less than an angel.

  The pilot settled deeper into his hedgerow, confident that in the morning “we’d get reinforcements and they’d blow the shit out of ’em and they’d pull me out and God bless.” But at around 8 p.m. he heard the sound of voices. An enemy patrol approached, beating the thickets looking for the downed airmen. “They came in there and they’re chitter-chattering away.” The squad of twelve soldiers began to dig twenty yards from where Henderson sat. The men chunked their shovels into the earth and threw the dirt into the nearby underbrush.

  It dawned on Henderson what all the digging was about: the NVA soldiers were building a machine-gun pit. But why do that in the middle of nowhere? The South Vietnamese hadn’t been here in many months; the front line was now miles away. After thinking for a few moments, Henderson decided there was only one possible answer: he had unwittingly become part of an ambush. Knowing an American was somewhere in the area, the NVA soldiers were planning to build the pit, pop a 12.7 mm machine gun into it, cover the gun with branches and leaves, then wait around until his rescuers arrived in their helicopters. Then they would kill as many as they could.

  Once he understood what the enemy was doing, Henderson decided he wasn’t going to become a piece of bait. That was beyond the pale. Combat pilots in Vietnam had a motto: “Better dead than a fuckup.” This situation fell under the moral clause of the adage. Anyone who allowed the NVA to grind up his friends with a hidden machine gun was not acting in accordance with the brotherhood’s core values.

  But if he wasn’t going to stay in this bamboo, where could he go? He began thinking of what he’d seen in those thirty or forty seconds he was descending on his parachute. He remembered the blue glint of water. It had to be a river. Henderson, the former swimming champion, mulled that over. What if he left his hiding place and made his way over the nearby fields to the water, then swam through enemy lines to friendly territory? Sure, the plan would expose him to the battalions of NVA hidden in the nearby fields, but it might save his fellow airmen. “I wasn’t going to set up my guys to run against that,” he said. “I’ll swim to Quang Tri, I don’t give a shit.” Quang Tri was at least ten miles from his present location, but he decided that was not going to be an issue.

  Just as Henderson readied himself to try the solo run for the river, the NVA squad returned. He could hear them moving through the brush; it seemed they were coming straight toward him. As the sounds drew closer, Henderson watched in horror as a hand appeared and began to pull away the leaves that he’d piled on top of his flight suit. A face appeared. “He looked at me and almost did a backflip. I scared the living shit out of the guy.”

  The soldier screamed. In the seconds afterward Henderson heard the distinct sound of a dozen rifles being cocked. He held a five-shot .38 in his right hand; the twelve soldiers, he guessed, each had an AK-47, with thirty rounds apiece.

  Even for Bill Henderson, Dartmouth grad and shit-hot combat pilot, those were daunting odds. He raised his arms in the air and walked slowly out of the brush.

  14

  Futility

  By April 4, the Hambleton operation had become a behemoth, drawing in the U.S. Coast Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. Hundreds of officers and airmen were involved and millions of dollars were being spent—and lost, in the form of damaged and destroyed aircraft—in what was becoming the biggest rescue mission in Air Force history and the largest of the Vietnam War. Three young Americans had died, two POWs—Henderson and Astorga�
�were being marched north, and another American, Mark Clark, was stranded behind enemy lines.

  One note of sanity was introduced: the no-fire zone around Hambleton had been gradually reduced until it stood at a radius of about a mile and a half. But Major Brookbank, the US Air Force adviser who’d begged controllers to send planes to his beleaguered men, believed the order had already done enormous damage. “In my opinion, this gave the enemy an opportunity unprecedented in the annals of warfare to advance at will,” said Brookbank. It was an exaggeration. But lives, Vietnamese and American, military and civilian, had certainly been sacrificed to save Gene Hambleton.

  The operation remained highly classified. There were no reports on network television, no footage of the frantic activity at Joker. Even the massive invasion of South Vietnam was not a major news story; America had grown tired of the war.

  One news consumer, however, was very interested in the bulletins about the “red fiery summer”: the president of the United States. Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, had been awaiting news of a North Vietnamese attack, half in fear and half in eagerness, for months. “In early 1972,” Nixon wrote, “we expected a major Communist offensive that would decide the outcome of the war . . . If it succeeded, South Vietnam would be swept off the map. If it failed, North Vietnam would be forced to negotiate an end to the war.”

  The invasion came at a tense, febrile time for Nixon. Just over a month earlier, he’d completed his visit to China, beginning the process of normalizing relations between the two countries. A summit with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, to discuss a new strategic arms limitation treaty was planned for May. Kissinger was scheduled to go to Moscow to arrange the details, but the invasion—and the American response to it—could, the two men believed, derail the meeting and endanger the warming relationship with the Soviets. A historic chance might be missed.

  Nixon believed that if he could win victories on the battlefield of Vietnam while at the same time opening up communist China to American influence, he could force the Soviets to the negotiating table on terms favorable to the United States. There they would discuss, among other things, a nuclear weapons treaty that would lead to a massive reduction in the number of ICBMs each country possessed. But if the US military failed to stop the North Vietnamese divisions, Brezhnev might sense weakness. He might walk away from the negotiations and adopt a more aggressive posture in theaters far outside Southeast Asia. “That’s one determination I’ve made,” Nixon said that February about Vietnam. “We’re not going to lose out there . . . Even with the election facing us, even with the diplomatic initiatives we have, we have to win it. We have to be sure we don’t lose here for reasons that affect China. They affect Russia. They affect the Mideast. They affect Europe. That’s what this is all about.”

  The first reports of the invasion had come in on March 30; ironically, the White House, nine thousand miles away from the invasion, would remain much better informed about its progress than many of the soldiers who were in the midst of it. Kissinger went to the Oval Office to inform the president the offensive had begun. The sound-activated tape machine that had been installed in the Oval Office the previous year recorded the conversation:

  KISSINGER: It looks as if they are attacking in Vietnam.

  NIXON: The battle has begun?

  KISSINGER: Yeah, the DMZ. And the sons of bitches [Kissinger was referring to the American military leaders in Vietnam] . . . Of course, the weather is too bad for us to bomb.

  NIXON: Hmm.

  KISSINGER: We must have the world’s worst air force.

  Weather did hamper the early counterattacks. But by the evening of April 2, it wasn’t just cloud cover that was hindering the counterattack. It was also the mission to save Gene Hambleton.

  Nixon was unaware that a mammoth rescue operation was under way; such operational details almost never reached his desk. He was solely concerned with the larger strategic and geopolitical picture. The president wanted the Air Force to hit the invading North Vietnamese regiments—their tanks, personnel carriers, transport trucks, SAM sites—and obliterate them. On April 3, when he read reports of the modest Air Force response to the invasion, Nixon was furious, “only barely able to control his temper.” The president brought the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, into the Oval Office and grilled him. “I ordered the use of strikes,” Nixon told him. “Five hundred sorties could have been flown.”

  Moorer replied that the USAF had managed to execute 138 sorties the day before. What he didn’t mention was that a large number of other attacks had been flown in support of the Hambleton mission. It’s likely Moorer had no idea who Gene Hambleton was or that he was down behind enemy lines, but there was a clear omission in the information he was giving Nixon, and it would continue for days.

  Nixon fumed at what he saw as the Air Force’s underwhelming response, and he directed that anger at General Creighton Abrams, the American commander in Vietnam. “What is his job out there?” the president asked on April 3. “Is it his job to try and see this kind of offensive is stopped?” He ordered a more vigorous response: B-52 runs, naval bombardments, a “massive use of all our assets . . . I want everything that can fly, flying in that area . . . Good God! In the Battle of the Bulge they were able to fly even in a snowstorm!” The president had been reading World War II history, and Eisenhower’s relentless 1944 counterattack in eastern Belgium and northeastern France was on his mind.

  On April 4, with the Air Force still unable to mount a counterattack that pleased the president, Kissinger relayed the substance of a conversation he’d had with Alexander Haig, the former Army general who was serving as an adviser to the administration. “Haig says, correctly,” Kissinger told Nixon, “if he were out there he’d be flying over the battlefield and throw[ing] monkey wrenches out of the plane, on the theory that it would hit somebody.” A few moments later, he reassured the frustrated president that the North Vietnamese would be beaten back. “This is the last gasp, Mr. President,” he said. “But . . . we have to act ferociously.”

  Nixon agreed. He ordered the Joint Chiefs of Staff to bring more firepower to bear on the North Vietnamese. “I want to see the Kitty Hawk,” he’d previously told Kissinger, talking about the Navy’s massive supercarrier. “We want to see more B-52s, we want to see A-1s, anything that you think.” Now he ordered the ships and planes into Southeast Asia. On April 4, Nixon directed that B-52 bombers be allowed to strike all the way up to the 18th parallel, far above the DMZ. The Joint Chiefs of Staff green-lighted an F-105G electronic countermeasures squadron to head to Korat from their base in Kansas, along with six entire F-4 squadrons. The aircraft carriers USS Kitty Hawk and USS Constellation—each carrying approximately sixty aircraft in their holds and on their decks—began steaming toward the South China Sea. A fleet of B-52s, fifty-four in all, were redeployed to Vietnam. It was, wrote one historian, “a rapid global mobility response unlike any in the history of warfare up to that time.”

  The escalation unnerved some observers in the States. The country had believed the war was winding down, but now Nixon was increasing the bombing and even expanding the target area into North Vietnam. Many journalists and members of Congress believed that the president had just destroyed any possibility of a Moscow summit. One senator called the expansion “reckless and wrong,” while a second suggested that Nixon had “lost touch with the real world.” A congressman went so far to say that the president “has thrown down the gauntlet of nuclear war to a billion people in the Soviet Union and China . . . Armageddon may be only hours away.” He was hyperventilating, but his words expressed the outer edge of the American mood.

  Nixon apparently never learned about the Hambleton mission while in office. Had he been informed during the early days of April that the Air Force was devoting an average of ninety sorties a day to the rescue of an obscure lieutenant colonel, his reaction most likely would have been sheer incredulity, then rage. For Nixon, this
was a world-historical moment.

  Orders continued to fly from Washington to Saigon. The president pressured Abrams, who was being considered for Army chief of staff, to stop the North Vietnamese or face losing the promotion. “I want Abrams braced hard,” he told his subordinates. “He’s not going to screw this one up. Is that clear?” Reports filtered into the Oval Office that the general hadn’t left his headquarters once since the offensive started; Kissinger and others took this as another sign of the general’s timidity. “If this isn’t fought more aggressively . . . by early next week,” Kissinger told the president, “you might want to consider relieving Abrams.” Nixon didn’t argue the point. “He’s had it,” he replied. “He’s fat, he’s drinking too much, and he’s not able to do the job.”

  Despite the unrelenting pressure, Abrams didn’t call off the Hambleton mission; he kept to his pledge to retrieve every American airman whenever possible. But it was clear even by April 4 that the operation was becoming controversial. If it kept eating up airmen and aircraft at its current rate, the counterattack against the North Vietnamese would inevitably suffer. “It was my understanding,” said Colonel Cecil Muirhead, chief of Joker, “that General Abrams was unhappy we were using so many of our resources to get one guy out. They wanted to know: How much longer is this going to go on?”

  15

  “I Know We’re Going to Die”

  Like many airmen deployed to Vietnam, Gene Hambleton had considered the possibility of being shot down before even setting foot in-country. Months before, he’d come to a decision. If he was stranded in enemy territory and couldn’t be rescued, he would not be taken alive. “[If] my military friends couldn’t get me, no one else would either,” he said. “I WOULD NOT go to Hanoi. I DID NOT want to be a guest at the Hanoi Hilton.”